The first two editions of Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans have become one of the two leading tutorials on EJB, with more than 75,000 copies sold. Its success was driven by the acknowledged quality of the book (just check out the reviews on amazon.com) and its authors. The Third Edition will continue in this tradition, covering the new EJB 2.1 specification, which was released with J2EE 1.4 in late 2003. This new edition is more than 30% revised, with 5 new chapters covering the latest features of this important release. In addition, the authors cover new ways that EJB is being used more effectively with popular open source solutions.The authors will maintain the basic organization of the previous two editions. Part One covers the fundamentals of building an EJB system. Part Two is devoted to programming with EJB. Part Three covers advanced EJB concepts and best practices, including transactions, persistence, clustering, integration, performance optimization, and choosing an EJB server. The appendixes cover EJB topics such as the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) and RMI-IIOP tutorials, CORBA interoperability, and the EJB Query Language.